By Erin Wiltgen
chh@heraldsun.com; 419-6654
EFLAND -- Setting a stepping stone in the musical landscape, Gravelly Hill band members are practicing a piece composed specifically for them, a feat rare among middle school musicians.
Gravelly Hill Middle School in Efland hired a composer to write a piece of music for the 61 members of the seventh- and eighth-grade combined ensemble. The resulting piece, called "Kitsune: The Fox Spirits," will premiere at the school's winter concert on Dec. 8.
"It's a really neat experience to get insights from the person who was actually at the origin of the piece," said Arris Golden, director of bands at Gravelly Hill. "It's something that I've always enjoyed participating in, and as a teacher I've always wanted to seize the opportunity to do it for my kids."
The whole thing started a few years ago when Golden contacted composer Brian Balmages about working on one of his pieces, "Moscow 1941," with her students. Since then, the two continued to run into each other over the years until Golden made the million-dollar request about a year and a half ago to compose a dedicated piece.
"Every time I have the opportunity to do this, it's special to me, regardless of the level of kids playing it, regardless of the location," Balmages said. "It's always a very big deal to me when there is a group of people that is willing and ready to devote itself to a piece that I've written and willing to share it."
So the brainstorming began. Director and composer bounced ideas off each other for months, discussing how to emulate this sound Balmages wanted and that specific ability of Golden's tuba players.
"It's using a lot of ethnic types of sounds that you wouldn't see in a concert-type band and trying to emulate those sounds with standard instrumentation, which was a challenge but was also quite fun," Balmages said.
One of the first steps was finding a song fit for an ensemble spanning a vast array of technical abilities.
"This piece had to shoot down the middle between a group of seventh-graders and a group of eighth-graders, who had two kind of discrete skill sets," Golden said.
Balmages said that while catering to different skill sets can be difficult, this piece didn't really have to tackle that particular obstacle because most instruments had two different parts. The top part held a more technically challenging melody for the advanced musicians, while less-experienced kids attacked the middle part.
"They're still very supportive and still a part of the piece," Balmages said. "But it doesn't push them beyond what they're capable of doing."
That being said, Balmages made sure that the two-part instrumentation fell naturally. He said that at no point did he have to adjust what he had written to make it easier for amateur players.
"When you do that, the music sounds squished," Balmages said. "It sounds watered down."
Instead, he said that the piece would have emerged more or less the same no matter what level of musicians he had written it for.
And the kids certainly seem to enjoy it, Golden said. While not all of the students grasp the full significance of having a piece composed just for them, all have vastly enjoyed the experience.
"It's a very cool thing to watch the kids work with this and work through this and understand things and understand how things are fitting together," Golden said.
But the kids aren't the only ones having fun. Balmages said that even though he loves the freedom of composing what he hears, he enjoys composing for kids.
"One of the joys of doing things for younger groups is kids get so excited about music and, to be honest, much more so than professionals," Balmages said. "That passion that kids have, it's hard to match."
